So I've tallied up all two of the suggestion we got from the suggestions thread and decided that /r/penpals is going to go through a huge overhaul. New CSS, new rules, new wiki, the whole shabang. We need your help with things to make this place better post overhaul, so if you want to be awesome and help out read on. (skip to the end if you don't like reading and just want to see if there's a role that you can help with)

Things I need to do:

New CSS.

New Wiki.

Upgrade the Rules.

New Sidebar

Flairs

CSS: We need new CSS. The things we have now are old and dated. Who wants old and dated CSS? Not many people that's who. New and not-dated CSS is where it's at. All the young and cool people have new CSS. (P.S: if you're an aspiring artist or can do basic things with photoshop and want to help with the new images, banners, etc etc, let me know. You could get the super cool and slightly exclusive Artist flare and maybe even a spot on the mod team.)

Wiki: Being a penpal isn't easy. Infact, with all the socialising, the awkward starting stage, trying to remember what people have said and what you got from secretly stalking them, and various other things, it's actually quite hard. The new wiki should be a comprehensive guide at how not to suck at getting penpals and most importantly, keeping them. There will also be common terms, links to useful resources and all sorts of awesome penpal related stuff on there. (P.S: if you have any suggestion as to what to write on the wiki, or want people to know about your own experiences, let me know.)

Rules: Well the rules on /r/penpals are kind of fuzzy. There aren't any iron clad super rules at the moment, there are just a few common sense, "don't be a twat" unwritten rules in place. I'm going to try and compress them so that it's quite clear what is and isn't allowed. (P.S: If you want to help with writing the upgraded rules, let me know)

Siebar: Mostly included in the above categories (of which most of that is new CSS). However I do want to revise the list of subreddits on there maybe add a few remove a few and make it useful and organised. (P.S: If you know about subreddits that should be on the sidebar but aren't let me know)

Flairs: The flairs we have right now are a bit boring. I might or might not change them but something I'm looking at is letting people have a predetermined set of small images as flares instead of just the small bunch of text that's currently there.

Tl;dr: You can help if you:

are an artist / someone who knows how to do basic image editing. (CSS art help)

know how to not suck about being a penpal and want to spread your worldly wisdom to the masses (wiki, guide help)

are a pseudo lawyer (or better yet, an actual lawyer) and know how to write rules that people can't be intentionally stupid about. (rules help)

Know a lot about penpal related subreddits and want to spread the penpal joy across reddit (sidebar help)

Really guys we need you on this. If you're awesome and help out you might get a super cool slightly exclusive custom user flare. Maybe even become a mod (probably not, but there's always a chance.)

if you were offering to help with the actuall CSS itself, unfortunately I actually know some CSS and am going to (very selfishly, might I add) use the overhaul to improve my CSS skills to ninja level. I am however horrible at image editing and thus I need an artist of sorts so you can do that. (yay we got a designer)

I'll be happy to accept help with the CSS if you want to assist in that field. I'll let you know when I start. (I'm basically trying to take an already established theme like naut / terriblename and deconstruct it so I can do all sorts of cool custom things for the subreddit.)

Thanks again for the offer, I look forward to seeing what you can do :)

Sorry, I'm on my phone so can't link (reads I'm too lazy to take all the time it'd take to link), but here are some other subs that might be of interest?

r/randomactsofpostcards

r/randommail

r/skype

r/lovenotes (it's pretty dead, but may get better with more interest/subscribers)

EDIT: because I thought of stuff for flair.

Just kind of brainstorming, but maybe there can be flair when submitting for: language (someone wanting to learn/practice a different language), snail/email/pm preference,

Maybe additional flair for: having post history (yeah, I don't really know how it'd work either, but I know sometimes people don't like to reply to someone with zero post history, maybe a fair for it would help quickly identify?), being a confirmed penpal (again, unsure on logistics but to help encourage people to actually send emails/letters if they've said they would).

And um, I had another flair idea but some kids just came to my house selling candy and I had to track down some cash because I just couldn't slam the door on little kids and so I forgot what else I was going to say 😯

I'm pretty new here, but I would love to see flair for differentiating snail mail and email posts. I don't know how to do this, but multiple flairs can be used at once, for people seeking any/all. /r/cfb is a good example of that.

Ummmm would be willing to help with rules and stuff, but I just need to know exactly what we need for it. Let me know and I'll be in touch. Source: criminal justice student about to graduate from undergrad program

As soon as i get the CSS and other stuff set up I'll put up a post asking the community for rules they think should be included. I'll let you know when that's up and when I'm done with it so we can work on getting the rules in place properly.

I'm kinda messing with the CSS stuff atm, it's proving to be a lot harder than I had initially thought, so this could take a while. Do you want to write down a draft of what kind of tips and stuff you would give people and pm that to me? I'll look through it, add it to the wiki and then eventually to the sidebar after getting CSS done.

On a note unrelated to anything in this post, perhaps using automod to remind people that sharing emails on a public forum leads to them being scraped would be an idea? I've lost count of how many emails I've seen just flicking through /r/penpals every few weeks

As soon as i get the CSS and other stuff set up I'll put up a post asking the community for rules they think should be included. I'll let you know when that's up and when I'm done with it so we can work on getting the rules in place properly.